He saw the handwriting on the wall. Which you can do, if you don't isolate yourself in a bubble from the people.This hemisphere’s political class received a strong message this month: make a promise to break from old – to turn your country in a new direction, to govern for the people instead of the corrupt elite – and you’d better keep it.[...]
Mexican President Vicente Fox suddenly backed down this week from the “desafuero,” his crusade to haul popular Mexico City governor Andres Manuel López Obrador into court and therefore bar him from running for president next year. He too, like Gutiérrez, thought the people had become passive after they voted him into office, but a million protesters outside his office on Sunday proved him wrong...
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On Wednesday night, Fox announced on live TV that Rafael Macedo, the attorney general that he appointed upon becoming president (at Washington’s behest) and who had led the legal process against López Obrador, had “resigned.”
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[Fox's] claim throughout the process had been that the desafuero was necessary to preserve the rule of law that he had ushered in, insuring that “no one is above the law” (Fox and Macedo, of course, had committed the same common, minor offense – ignoring a court order – for which they were stripping López Obrador of his political rights). Now, incredibly, he claims that Macedo’s resignation and the almost-certain abandonment of the charges against López Obrador represent the defense of democracy and the rule of law.
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[An] oft-heard comment in coverage of the march that pushed Fox into ending his crusade was that many were not marching for López Obrador himself so much as against the ugly politics that the people have so clearly rejected in the past. In this way, though the political context is very different, the marchers had in mind the same feelings as the “forajidos” in Ecuador, and those all over América who have struggled as part of the political changes sweeping Latin America.
The U.S. State Department has still had nothing to say so far about all of this upheaval right next door. While Condoleezza Rice travels around South America to shower praise on Colombia’s Uribe and voice her “concern” over other governments’ moves towards regional integration and independence from foreign domination [...], all State has to say about Mexico comes in the form of more shrill travel warnings about the threat to U.S. citizens from narcos across the border.
¡Vive la democracia!
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